


in the dark

by the Girl in 221C (naienko)



Series: Vignettes from the Girl in 221C [3]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, Nightmares, Tea, secrets in the dark
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-03-26
Updated: 2012-03-26
Packaged: 2017-11-02 13:51:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 843
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/369690
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/naienko/pseuds/the%20Girl%20in%20221C
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Listening to someone else's pain can make you forget your own.</p>
            </blockquote>





	in the dark

After the second nightmare jerked him panting and sweaty out of sleep, John gave it up as a bad job, threw on a t-shirt, and went downstairs to make tea. Sherlock was sleeping the heavy sleep of a closed case, which meant nothing short of a foghorn in his ear was likely to wake him. John didn't bother to be more than nominally quiet.

As he was stepping out to go back up to his room, tea mug in hand, he spotted Summer's face glimmering through the dusk at him from the foot of the stairs. She didn't look like she'd even been to bed yet (although, he thought, with Summer as with Sherlock it could be hard to tell). John offered a one-shouldered shrug before she beckoned him down the stairs.

"Come keep me company while you drink that," she said.

"W -- I -- don't want to keep you up," John fumbled.

"You aren't. I wasn't sleeping. You can tell me about it while I game." She waved her hand at him again. "Oh, come on, you wouldn't be out of bed at this time of night alone without a reason. I don't have to be Himself to figure that out."

John looked down at his tea, up at Summer, down at his tea, sighed, and went down the stairs.

"What's going on?" she asked, dropping into her computer chair. A pair of headphones lay abandoned by the mousepad, and onscreen a brightly pixellated character was exuding fire and obscured by a number of ui windows. She spun the chair around to face the loveseat. John took the hint and tucked his feet up on the red cushions. Atop the backrest, the tortoiseshell kitten stretched her toes, gave a gigantic yawn, and went back to sleep.

"You know I'm not going to leave you alone til you tell me."

He took momentary refuge in his tea mug. "Just dreams," he said, when he came up.

"I'm gonna teach y'all not to lie to me," she muttered.

He rubbed his face with his free hand, still feeling the residue of dream-fear. "It's nightmares."

"Mmm," she nodded. "Afghanistan?"

Pinching the bridge of his nose, he muttered, "Sherlock turns up in them sometimes. That's worse."

"Oh?"

"It's the way he just charges off without thinking." John took a big gulp of tea, to wash the taste out of his mouth just thinking about it.

"He really does, doesn't he?"

"It's like he thinks he's immortal. All of them. There were so many I couldn't save." He closed his eyes. "I couldn't protect them. I couldn't save them. There wasn't anything I could do. It's so ... "

"Feeling helpless?"

"Exactly. Helpless. I'm a doctor, for Christ's sake, and I can't -- I couldn't ... "

"You thought you were supposed to save them all."

"I am!"

"You do everything you can."

"It's not enough."

"What would be enough?"

Furry ears insinuated themselves under John's hand, jostling the tea mug, and he opened his eyes long enough to put it safely on the floor before he attended to the importunate cat, a tabby this time. He'd forgotten Summer had so many cats. He coaxed a low purr from the tabby before continuing.

"I don't know. I'm supposed to -- "

"Protect him from himself," she interjected.

"Yes!"

Summer rubbed her lips thoughtfully. "You know what I'm going to say here. Will it make any difference, hearing it from someone else?"

"I don't know. It might."

"Gods know, I've said this to myself often enough. Shit _happens_ , John. It hurts like hell, and there's never anything you can do about it. It's ugly and painful and not your fault." She planed her hands back through her hair, leaving unlikely waves and ripples. "There's always something you tell yourself you could have done. You can eat yourself up with 'if only'. If only I'd gone with him that day, anything at all might have been different. I wouldn't even be here."

John watched her as she turned her head, staring off into her own past. The doctor part of himself stirred a bit, sensing someone else's pain.

"We are never given to know the tally of the living," she went on, at last. It sounded like a quote. "If ... if making things different, not going through that fire, meant that you would never be here, never meet me, or Sherlock ... would you want that?"

The word jolted out of him before he thought. "No!"

"There you are, then. It could never have gone any other way. You always had to walk through hell to get here." Summer pressed her lips together. "I know that's not much help. It's just as easy to hurt yourself on that stone wall as on 'if only'. I'm sorry. I meant to try to be more comforting."

He gave her his one-shouldered shrug again. "Didn't expect comfort."

She gave the soft laugh he'd come to associate with her self-deprecating humor. "Now that I've got thoroughly off-topic, do you want to tell me about the dream?"

Oddly, he found that he did.


End file.
